


Advanced Needlepoint

by emilyshka



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-22
Updated: 2011-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-27 20:00:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/299507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emilyshka/pseuds/emilyshka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an evening out, Sherlock is forced to play doctor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Advanced Needlepoint

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this piece of fan art](http://sherlockbbc.tumblr.com/post/9862861925/reapersun-image-googling-how-to-suture-a) by [reapersun](http://reapersun.tumblr.com/)

“We can fix this,” Sherlock said as they stepped over the threshold of 221 B and he absently flicked on the lights, steering John up the stairs and pushing him rather ungently into the bigger armchair, with the union jack pillow on it.

“YOU HAVE NO BEDSIDE MANNER” John wanted to say, “I RESENT BEING IN YOUR CARE AND I AM LOSING MORE THAN A LITTLE BLOOD AND IT’S YOUR BLOODY FAULT AND MY FACE IS GOING TO ROT OFF BECAUSE YOU ARE TOO PARANOID FOR US TO GO TO A HOSPITAL.”

“Ow,” he said instead, very quietly and between gritted teeth but he’d still said it and that made him feel a little better. Until a dishtowel flew into his face from across the room.

“Apply even pressure, you’re losing quite a bit of blood.”

“I _know_ I’m supposed to apply pressure, I’m a _doctor_.”

“Yes, and isn’t that a convenient position for us to be in,” He was now tearing about the living room, lifting cushions and turning around before he’d even looked underneath to search somewhere else. “You seemingly unable to simply Heal Thyself, and me without any fresh needles.”

“I could _heal_ myself just _fine_ if you…needles?”

“Yes for stitches. For your face.”

“Are you—of course you are. No! No, no, no! If you— well, if we have to do this at home what’s wrong with my kit? Just go get if from my room.”

“No,” Sherlock was working his way into the kitchen now, “I borrowed it, I needed a final touch for my doctor’s costume—for the case—and I left it at Mr. Dunlop’s office the better for him to snoop.”

“Couldn’t you have made your own?”

“Can’t fake something like that, your kit has seen years of hard work, it shows—" He was yelling from the kitchen, it sounded to John as if every pot and pan they owned were being hurled across the room and into the sink and then he was back in the living room, still empty-handed, fingers absently threading through his hair and fiddling with the cuffs of his shirt. He looked more wild than John had ever seen him, and John wondered suddenly if Sherlock had ever had to physically care for anyone other than himself before, other than in the most basic way. Or even that. He opened his mouth to say…something, when Sherlock looked him full in the face for the first time in an hour.

They’d been investigating in Hackney, looking around an abandoned house when John had accidentally found a squatter on the top floor. “Found” being a kind word for “stepped on his camouflage sleeping bag and brought the inhabitant to immediate drunken wakefulness”. It was only due to John’s military training that his body had moved him nearly out of range of the man’s club before his mind had time to tell him what had gone wrong.

“No doubt made from the leg of any of those rotten chairs we found toppled in the dining room, judging by the paint chips in your scalp and the width of the wound,” as Sherlock had noted during the cab ride home, tapping something into his phone and studiously not looking at John at all.

But he was looking at John now, and John felt pinned in place, not moving or breathing as his body abruptly switched into Fight or Flight for no reason that John’s brain could find and then Sherlock was squatting in front of him, eyes level with his and his hands reaching for him. John instinctively leaned away but Sherlock grabbed his collar and tugged him back, and began unbuttoning his shirt.

John struggled not to swallow his tongue.

“I doubt Mrs. Hudson would thank you for leaving your bloody clothes on her furniture.” He quickly unbuttoned the front and peeled away the fabric, leaving John in his under-shirt, which was also stained. He gently lifted the towel from his head for a moment to feed the arm through his sleeve.

John took a moment to appreciate the utter absurdity of the moment, and to allow his already-edgy nerves to calm themselves.

“What a stupid way to be hurt,” He said, when he’d sorted out the inside of his mouth.

“Incredibly,” Sherlock agreed, neatly folding the ruined shirt and then tossing it carelessly towards the table, where it landed and started soaking blood into a chair. He then turned and rose in a neat not-quite-pirouette and landed in the other armchair, leaning forward again to open John’s computer.

“Don’t use my laptop—“

“Yes, well, I’m not getting blood on mine, am I? And it’s all the way over there,” He gestured vaguely toward the kitchen and typed in the password. After changing it many times, each password more unlikely than the last, John had finally left it at “mashed_turnip”: the most random thing he could think of, and also what Mrs. Hudson had offered him as leftovers the evening he’d come home to find three gigabytes of gruesome murder photos saved to his desktop. Sherlock would only figure it out again if he tried another one, as he had the last seven. Sherlock had a way of making him pick his battles more frequently than he might have otherwise, and he felt that he would need all of his argumentative power in reserve for this evening as Sherlock bolted to his feet and out the door in one continuous flowing movement.

John didn’t ask where he was going. He’d be back soon, and the pain in his head was getting worse as he pressed the bloody dishtowel to the cut. John breathed in and out, slowly, careful to sit straight in the chair and apply even pressure to the wound. It stung, and he could feel from the wetness of the towel that he was losing slightly more blood than he would have liked.

“Just a scratch,” he muttered, “Nothing to worry about, we’ll clean it and—“ A wave of nausea washed over him and unbidden thoughts including words like _concussion_ and images of all the head wounds of delirious and dizzy soldiers on the battlefield, filling with dust, with sand, with _flies_.

But Sherlock was back, the same silent, fluid movements back through the door, but now he was holding what appeared to be…

“Is that…Mrs. Hudson’s needlepoint kit?”

Sherlock held the small quilted floral basket up near his face and waggled it a bit, smiling his thin, eyebrow-arching smile. “She never learned to use it, I believe it was a present from a relative she loathes. In any case, she won’t notice anything’s wrong with it because she’s never opened it.”

“Yes, wonderful, very impressive but that still leaves the fact that you plan to use a NEEDLEPOINT KIT on my FACE.”

Sherlock ignored him and, rather worryingly, lit the Bunsen burner on the table.

“Sherlock,” John’s voice was beginning to develop a panicked note he was not at all comfortable with, “I really—I _appreciate_ what you are trying to do, but I don’t think it’s as bad as you think.”

“Oh, it’s…quite bad,” He found a mirror and tossed it to John, who, after a moment’s pause, peeled away the towel and examined the wound.

Shit. He needed at least a few stitches. Unless he wanted to scar in a truly impressive way. But there was no way he was having the operation take place out here.

“…Alright, I need stitches. But...let’s at least do it in the bathroom. I’d appreciate just a _semblance_ of sanitization.”

Not to mention that in the bathroom there was a mirror big enough for him to keep an eye on what Sherlock was doing. He wasn’t really a vain man, he didn’t think. But he had been told by a fair share of women that he wasn’t bad looking, and he liked to keep it that way.

In the bathroom, things were worse.

John had never had to operate on himself before. Anywhere else he’d been injured, there had been procedures for that sort of thing. Endless procedures. He was taken from the lines on transport A to infirmary B and doctor C who patched him up and left him for a couple of bored days in the city, looking in at tourist shops and waiting for his head, or his arm, or his leg to heal and then he was back.

But he’d never had to watch.

And, more than that, really, he’d never been operated on by someone who had absolutely no clue what they were doing. Or, so he assumed. Sherlock actually seemed to know quite well what he was doing, once John was able to separate the gash in the mirror from his own head and the pain from his body.

He’d offered John something to calm his nerves and his pain but John really didn’t want to have _that_ conversation right now and had declined, without even seeing whether it was narcotics after all, or something more docile.

John thought, focusing on the neat, ladylike stitches Sherlock was making in his forehead, that he had almost certainly done this before. He’d been in scrapes, no doubt, before John had come along. Had injuries. Injuries he’d learned to handle himself, or risk some kind of professional involvement in his very cramped personal world. He’d made do. And now John was making do, in the bathroom of an apartment he shared with a man he still barely knew, though he had risked his life for him, and was ready to risk it again tomorrow, once this whole “head injury bungle” had been sewn up, as it were.

It was amazing, he thought, as the pain became less defined, the picture more clear, Sherlock’s face in the mirror more at ease, what the human body could do when given a significant amount of trust. Trust both for the owner of the body and the person caring for it. He smiled, suddenly, and the steady motion of sterilized needle and thread paused.

“Are you alright, John?” Sherlock asked, looking at him in the mirror.

“Oh, fine.” Watson said, careful not to move his head and tear his unfinished stitches. “I was just thinking that I trust you, Holmes.”

The needle remained motionless, the blue eyes direct. “You…well,” he said, “Of course you’re absolutely right, I can tell the width of a needle to 0.01 of a millimeter and I have the very best information on sterilization so you needn’t—“

“No, no,” Watson said, feeling slightly drunk on adrenaline and endorphins as his body released them to keep him happy in the midst of crisis, “I mean that, as a person, regardless of your undoubted skill in the field of emergency medicine, I trust you. With my life.”

The needle had not moved and still hovered above the next stitch, “That’s, erm.” Holmes, for once speechless, smiled a bit, genuinely, in his own odd way, “That’s very good to hear, John.” The needle and thread went back to work, perhaps a bit more quickly than before, though no less neat. “I can say, of course, that I feel the same.”

“Yes, well,” John said, closing his eyes at last to the sight of himself in the mirror, “ _I_ am a doctor, after all.”


End file.
